


The Wretched Automatons

by The_Exile



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (Video Games)
Genre: AU, Gen, Heroes to Villains, Lovecraftian apocalypse, Mild Language, Sonic 2 (Mega Drive), Villains to Heroes, cursed jewels, evil killer mutant fluffy animals, orbital death lasers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:02:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate interpretation of Sonic 2 where Robotnik is genuinely just trying to build and sell robots, the environmental devastation that happens around him isn't caused by him, the chaos emeralds are cursed gems from an evil temple and Sonic is part of a plague of demonic cyborg mutant cute fluffy animals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wretched Automatons

There are things that can ruin a man or even an entire world, things that you should never trust. Things you should just put right back where you found them and walk away from if you ever set eyes on. Things like deals that are too good to be true, emails that look like spam, contracts with the military, any organised crime racket or suspiciously large corporation, anything you suspect might be an alien from outer space, anything called a 'chaos' something, cursed emeralds and hyper-intelligent demonic mutant hedgehogs.

You don't believe me about the hedgehog? Well, I've got it all on camera, the zones where the little bastards didn't break all the cameras as well, or blow the whole place up before my robots could retrieve the cameras, or ambush the salvage robots on their way out. Let me tell you my story, if only to amuse me, even if you don't believe a crazy old failed scientific genius.

Oh yes, I'm still a genius, even though my plans didn't quite work out. The only person whose genius even matched my own was that of my grandfather, Gerald Robotnik, the man who taught me everything I know about robotics and aerospace engineering. It was his work that I developed to build my project, which I had hoped would one day revolutionise this world and immortalise the Robotnik name. Now we're about to go down in history as the worst catastrophe ever to hit the planet (and half of you still believe it was my fault, which I hope to prove to the contrary) so I suppose that counts for something. It was up on his orbital satellite laboratory, (embarrassingly egg-shaped so that scanners could be placed on it in all directions, leading to its nickname of the Egg, and later when I was forced to weaponise it to drive back the hedgehog invasion, the 'Death Egg' and me as the 'Crazy Egg Man' or just the 'Egg Man') that I began to develop my plans. First I scanned down some suitable locations to start building. There were a few abandoned mines and factories that nobody would miss if I turned them into robotics laboratories, in particular the old Metropolis Project that the Government had cut funding to last year and the Mystic Caves, which I should have realised from the name was a bad idea to build anything in, or indeed go anywhere near. I wasn't aware back then how much trouble anything labelled 'mystic' or 'forbidden' or 'cursed', or that was glowing, generally caused.

If I had, I would have just ignored the intense power source that my sensors randomly picked up in the middle of a rainforest, matching no known source of energy ever recorded except for a few vague notes in my grandfather's journals, referring to it as 'Chaos Energy'. Once my scouting drones, a simpler design back then, although they still looked like bees (I like bees, okay? They're pretty.), had returned with a giant, ominously glowing jewel that wasn't the colour of any naturally occurring gemstone on the planet but had the rough molecular structure of an emerald, and tended to cause the testing apparatus to explode if I ran any other tests on it whatsoever, or tried to hook it up to a battery, an ordinary sane person would have thrown it away, or better yet, sealed it in a lead-lined concrete box at the bottom of the ocean. That was the same night the animals started appearing. They had gotten into my drones – actually inside them – and started chewing them apart from the inside. My robots were being animated by their electrical currents activating the circuits, like cyborg versions of parasitic insects. When I finally got them out, a lot of them bit me but other than that, they were acting pretty much like any other animals, bearing in mind that animals have always hated me and I mutually loathe them, and that animals who had been inside drones for days on end generally weren't in the best condition or mood. 

I told one of my research correspondents about the animals and asked for his advice about animal-proofing my robots. Unfortunately, a protest organisation that was spying on the local University for any evidence of unethical research misheard him, or possibly deliberately twisted the truth to make me a scapegoat to get at the University, and rumours began to spread. The local newspaper printed an article that claimed I was deliberately placing animals in my machines as a power source. As if this would be at all efficient, considering how many animals I would have to go through just to power one robot for a year, and how many robots I planned on having in operation at once, or even possible with the current state of my technology, weird mystical gems notwithstanding. It was too late, though; rumour spread fast, newspapers sensationalised matters to make the stories sell, certain types of people believed all sorts of ridiculous crap that the newspapers printed, those people were often the type to take it too far, or at least to spread the twisted version of the news even further. I had a reputation. I was the Egg Man, the evil Doctor Robotnik. 

After the first attack on my chemical plant – the one where I was developing a more efficient type of battery to power the robots, so that I could introduce it publicly and prove that it wasn't made out of cute fluffy animals, which struck me as ironic, especially as the sabotage of the plant caused the chemicals to leak into the local water supply when I had made all attempts possible to stop it from doing so – I decided to install security drones. This was immediately misinterpreted as an attempt to create an army of robots to take over the world, even though I could program an AI reliable enough to tell the difference between hostile and friendly targets and even aim not to kill, unlike the military drones of the time. I even had one of them hand out lollipops to children outside the factory as a publicity stunt, although the lollipops smelled of chemicals and got thrown at the robot, gumming up its engines and causing it to explode. 

Unfortunately, I had failed to program the robots to kill all small furry animals on sight. It probably would have caused further complaints, but it would have saved the entire factory from being overrun. I hadn't realised at that point that the situation had escalated, not until I returned to the room with the emerald in it, and the scout drones who I had ordered to take the emerald back to where they picked it up from, and found every single robot destroyed. The emerald was missing. 

My original plan was to scan down the emerald's power signature again, taking some heavier firepower with me that I maybe hadn't told the military I owned. I hadn't even known that the vast stretch of undersea ruins existed until I saw it there, like the remnants of an entire sunken city. The emerald sat there on an altar surrounded by columns that were engraved with friezes of long-forgotten deities. I wanted to leave; I didn't really have an artistic soul to match my scientific talent and I had never been comfortable with abstract concepts, even the philosophical implications of my own inventions. This was looking more and more like the work of mystical forces, a world outside my domain. My own robots, some of the aquatic designs I had built to handle dangerous work at sea, such as offshore oil drilling, surrounded the emerald. 

I turned to leave. It was only a few of my robots, I could live without them and I was glad the emerald was at the bottom of the sea where I would never have to see the damn thing again. I put up danger beacons around that area of the sea, disconnected all the affected robots from my grid and started work on changing the security keys on all the robots I had manufactured so far, starting with the aquatic designs. I planned to seal them shut somehow, add more armour so that the animals couldn't get in. I had just finished writing up the new design ready to start producing when it happened.

The cause of the massive spill at the automated oil rig was never quite determined. It was first blamed on equipment malfunction, then the security drones that had been seen on the scene, acting uncharacteristically paranoid and firing several times at things that couldn't be seen on the cameras. A stray volley of bullets probably hit the tanks. This somehow changed to it being my fault, me having deliberately ordered my robots to cause an oil spill, oil spills apparently being such a huge financial gain to me and/or an efficient way to destroy the planet when you have an orbital satellite that could theoretically mount a giant laser.

I arrived on the scene just in time to see the whole thing go up in flames. Silhouetted against the flames I saw him; the hedgehog. Jumping impossibly high into the air, he performed a rude gesture at me with almost humanoid appendages that looked nothing like a hedgehog could have, before diving into the black ocean. Hedgehogs weren't that large either. Nothing that lived on land was as fast. The surviving robots chased him across the water and so did I. He led me to the hills above the Mystic Caves, then down into the mining complex itself, where of course he had also destroyed all the automated equipment I had tried to set up. The place was a death trap when I first discovered it, the previous mining operation having been abandoned halfway through after rumours that the mountains were cursed. Some kind of unnaturally glowing rocks had been discovered and it had frightened the superstitious miners away. I had laughed when I was told of the rumours, saying that my robots didn't have souls, so they couldn't care less even if they were cursed. Like I said, I know better these days. Of course I found more of the emeralds, and the hedgehog collecting them up with a manic glint in his eye. He was bright blue, a colour that you only found in animals when they were poisonous.

Over the next few weeks, I spent all my time cursed mutant animal-proofing my robots, as well as leading pre-emptive strikes into territories I knew to be completely overrun with the creatures, who were often still wearing my robotic shells. I overtly had a robot army these days, one that the military accepted only because they were too busy with their own issues to try and stop me. All the designs for military drones they had forced me to build for them in order to obtain further funding for a now doomed project were also malfunctioning. They were growing afraid of the situation themselves, and afraid of myself, whom everyone still thought was to blame. Why believe a cute hedgehog over an overweight failed mad scientist with a stupid moustache? Meanwhile, the attacks continued despite my best efforts. The completely automated casino, my most popular invention, was forced to shut down when the robot croupiers began to run amok. Then the Project Metropolis robotics factory, my most heavily guarded stronghold apart from the Death Egg itself, was overrun. It had been the only place I managed to animal-proof in time, I had an entire army's worth of drones patrolling it, but somehow they still found their way into it. Nothing I tried had made any difference whatsoever. Even after I self-destructed the factory in a last ditch attempt to at least kill the damn hedgehog, I saw it jump from the wreckage unharmed. I swear that creature has multiple lives.

The last robots I saw leaving the factory were my scout drones, the ones I designed specifically to be able to explore in any environment, including the vacuum of space. They were the only robots that could return directly to the Death Egg. I had stopped leaving the Death Egg long ago. It was the only place that I would ever be safe, now that I had accidentally tampered with the forbidden forces of the planet itself. If I have to, I'll use the laser. We always did need to leave this planet behind, and I'm not the only person with a colony here in space, so at least some of us will survive. It's probably not powerful enough to destroy the whole world anyway, just the parts of it I point the laser at.

Except that the hedgehog is coming here. The drones already returned, completely unaffected. They had somehow managed to leave in time. The hedgehog doesn't need machines to go into space. 

His spines are glowing golden. His eyes are glowing red. I can see him on the observation panel now, without even having to zoom in. He's heading directly for the station...


End file.
